Well back in the line the Red Queen's Knight is on the phone, continuing to try his best to get the King's Rook back in line, but the King's Rook is pulling out old bank statements, trying to prove his worth. You can't hear what the Knight is saying to him but if you were looking at his face you'd see him watching our guy pretty carefully, and he's smiling as he talks easily on the phone. He knows the Rook's already in, and this is just the way you pay the Piper.

I was full boss the first two years out of school but I lost the right leg and then two weeks later the left one. I've still got one arm but they blew my brains out last year on Delta and so that's new too. Which I like. Simon's comm is bulky on the outside of his head and he never takes it off. All my stuff's inside.

I think that Red gave them back years even as it took a percentage of their oxygen and a majority of their gravity, and now they are breathless and weightless and in love and young again and I start to fall in love with them again too.

You are a man who has been proud and who has been laid low, you are a person who said goodbye to your father with a smile and leapt in one moment, free of gravity, all the way up to Red, like you were dancing. And you never looked back.

We mouth the words along her, some in an ironic stance and others with teary wonder, and we are one Red family. I wonder, in these times, if it's because we were all trained so well in the Book down on Blue, if these rhythms and these pledges cling to us like dust, or if there is a greater language, free from any temporary context: the language of grace, as big as all the sky.

After so long fearing the Shuttle's destruction, and so much work staving off that nightmare, it is curious that such a simple device, a plastique bomb with a timer, would have been affixed in full view of the Governing Body, with no intervention.

There was a law against laws that told you not to think the thought or say the word before you said it. Once on Blue it was outlawed to tell a person they couldn't think the thought they hadn't yet thought. And now it is the heart of the Book.

I got that thing open and it hurt but it was worth it, seeing it under the light of the sun. Remember when he was a friend? The last time I loved him was on the Fairy when we went sunside and the world was full of light and Rend smiled so bright.